Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to graphical user interfaces and, more specifically, to a multi-touch based graphical user interface for interacting with menus on a handheld device.
Description of the Related Art
A conventional handheld electronic device may include a multi-touch screen that displays graphical data and allows a user to interact with the graphical data. Multi-touch screen devices may display a graphical user interface (GUI) on the multi-touch screen with which the user interacts by touching graphical elements of the GUI displayed on the multi-touch screen. The user may input commands and/or data to various applications that execute on the multi-touch screen device via different GUIs associated with the various applications.
However, multi-touch screen devices are typically small enough to fit in one hand and, consequently, the multi-touch screen is usually correspondingly small. Thus, when the user interacts with a GUI displayed on the multi-touch screen, any data that is also being displayed on the multi-touch screen may be obscured by the various graphical elements of the GUI, such as GUI menus. In this situation, the workflow of the user may be disrupted.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a more effective way to display, activate and interact GUIs on multi-touch screens.